Bidding and auctions FAQs

Twitter Ads are priced using an auction model. Auction-based pricing helps ensure advertisers achieve optimal results while creating the best possible experience for users. Advertisers have two options to choose from when determining how to set bids for their campaigns, automatic or maximum bidding.

Automatic bidding is a bidding option that enables Twitter to auto-optimize bids for a given campaign objective and budget on the advertiser’s behalf. When selecting the automatic bid option, Twitter will attempt to enter the advertiser in auctions with the lowest bid possible, while also delivering on the advertiser’s overall campaign objectives.

Maximum bidding allows users to manually select how much a follow, lead, click or engagement is worth to their business. When entering your manual bid, you will not pay that amount when you win an objective-based campaign auction. Instead, you will only pay one penny above the second place advertiser’s quality-adjusted bid. The common term for this model is a second price auction.

When setting up a Promoted Tweets campaign, you’ll be given several bidding options, depending on your objective. For most objectives, you can choose automatic bidding or maximum bidding. For some objectives as noted below, you can additionally choose target bidding. For avoidance of doubt, your objectives are set by you in your sole discretion and may differ between you and other advertisers; therefore our obligation is to deliver the engagements as counted by us at the price resulting from the automated mechanism explained below. Here’s how each setting works:

Automatic 

Your bid will be optimized to get the best results at the lowest price (within your budget.) You will pay the optimized price for each engagement delivered.

Maximum 

You’re telling us the maximum you are willing to pay for each engagement. You won’t pay more than your maximum bid for each engagement, and you may pay less.

Target bidding

Note: This feature is available for “Website Clicks and Conversions” or “Leads on Twitter” campaigns.

You’re telling us your target cost per link click (or per lead). We’ll optimize your bids to achieve this average cost, typically within 20% of your target on a daily basis. You will pay the actual average cost for all link clicks (or leads) in a day.

When making a change or update to a bid (for example, changing from “maximum” to “target” bidding or adjusting the target bid number) it will take time (sometimes up to 2 days) for the change to be reflected in campaign performance.

Changing your target bid

If you change your target bid throughout the day, we will optimize towards the highest target bid that you had entered for that day. On the following day, we’ll begin optimizing for the target bid that was set at the end of the previous day.

Changing your bid type

When changing from maximum to target bidding, there may be a delay until the platform is able to bring your average cost per link click (or per lead) closer to your target cost. This delay can be effected over 24 hours in some cases.

All pricing options are ideal to help advertisers get the most out of their campaigns and the pricing option preference can vary depending on the needs of a specific campaign.

For experienced Twitter Ads advertisers, the automatic bidding option will allow them to drive a more cost efficient campaign. Additionally, for new advertisers, automatic bidding provides the easiest way to quickly get a campaign properly serving and receiving impressions.

Advertisers that prefer more control over a campaign and have strict budget requirements, the maximum bid option allows advertisers to easily set a max cost per objective-based campaign to ensure they do not pay more than they are willing to. Additionally, the maximum bid option allows advertisers to manually set a higher bid, which increases the likelihood of their ad displaying in front of the targeted audience.

For advertisers that select either the Website Clicks and Conversions or Leads on Twitter campaigns, target bidding is defaulted as the selected pricing option. The target bidding pricing option is likely to result in more link clicks or leads, while maintaining an average cost per link click or lead that works for them.

To manually set your bid, it’s important to think about how much a certain objective will be worth to you over the lifetime of your relationship with that user.

If you are interested in using the maximum bid option, you will need to select this option from the pricing option drop down. Below are the recommend bids per objective:

Followers campaign: $2.50 - $3.50

Website clicks or conversions campaign: $1.68 – $10.00

Tweet engagements campaign: $1.50 - $2.50

App installs or app engagements campaign: $1.95 – $3.25

Leads on Twitter campaign: $4.47 – $23.00

In order to determine which ads to display on Twitter, we take into account both the bid amount and the quality score of your ad. A quality score is generally comprised of three broad elements, the three R’s:

Resonance: are consumers engaging with your Tweet? Do they retweet, favorite, or reply often?

Relevance: is your Tweet related to things a user is interested in?

Recency: is your Tweet fresh? Twitter is a real-time platform about what is happening now, so fresher tweets get higher priority. 

With a second price auction, you can bid what you truly believe a Tweet engagement or Account follow is worth to you without fear that you are overpaying, since you will never pay a penny more than the second place advertiser’s quality-adjusted bid. Bidding your true value will also allow you to avoid losing volume you should have won because you intentionally underbid to avoid paying too much. 

 If you select the maximum bid option, you should begin setting your bids as your true, private value of an engagement or follow. Doing so will maximize the value of your campaign by ensuring you gain the optimal amount of impressions without having to worry about overpaying at a high bid level.

However, by select the automatic bid option, you benefit by not having to spend time deciding how much to bid or having to anticipate other advertisers’ bids. Instead, you can focus on your marketing objectives and fine-tuning your account and Tweets to engage consumers.

When you create a campaign or click into a campaign to edit it, a suggested bid will appear next to the maximum bid once you enter a campaign budget, daily budget, and campaign start / end dates. If you change your campaign budget or daily budget, their suggested bid will update accordingly. Until you enter a maximum bid yourself, the maximum bid will automatically be filled in with the mid-point of the bid guidance.

We look at how you performed in recent auctions and the budgeting on your campaign. We then suggest the bid range that is likely to help you spend your target budget each day and in the time they’ve allocated for their campaign.

Our bid guidance is an educated recommendation based on our internal algorithms. While they will help you bid more effectively, we cannot guarantee that your campaign will deliver in full or that you will spend through your daily budget. 

If you would like to consistently spend through your desired daily budgets, we recommend selecting the automatic bid pricing option. Since the bid is optimized for a given campaign objective and budget on the advertiser’s behalf, you are more likely to spend through your configured daily budget.

Absolutely! Bid guidance is intended to be a helpful suggestion. You are always free to bid any value you like that is at or above the minimum bid of $0.01 per engagement.